On Aug 14 1941 St Maximilian Kolbe died in a starvation bunker in Auschwitz where he had been consigned for weeks with 9 others as punishment for another prisoner’s escape. Kolbe, a Franciscan priest, had volunteered to take the place of another prisoner with a wife and children.
When I was at school at a Franciscan College 50 years ago, a priest came round collecting for the cause of his beatification. When in Krakow, I visited Auschwitz, in a period when people were question whether the events took place or on the scale reported, to see for myself.
